If you haven’t yet read the Harry Potter Series, you are missing out. While the novels may not be “high art” in the traditional sense, they are incredible stories told well. But use this story as a cautionary tale. Don’t mistake some of the fan fiction for the real thing. That may be a very confusing.

Shelley Zhang and Chris Chappell, both from New York, work on a show called China Uncensored. They’ve known each other for nearly a decade. The following messages came after Chappell finally began reading Harry Potter, something Zhang had encouraged for years.

Chappell was almost completely new to the Potter universe. “When it was happening I thought, I was not going to get on the bandwagon,” he told BuzzFeed.

He’d seen the last movie, but that was it (and starting there might have been confusing enough). So he bought the books online and got started. “I loved it. I was instantly hooked,” he said.

That love, though. It was troubled by what he found in book 5. The books do get more complicated and mature as Harry ages, but book 5, with all of the sex and suicide wasn’t what Chappell expected. “My initial reaction was, ‘Wow, puberty hit Hogwarts hard,'” he said.

(For what it’s worth, the fan fiction Chappell read appears to be “Harry Potter and the Psychic Serpent.”)

“How could we make something like this up,” Zhang said. “Chris and I, we write comedy and we have never made so many people laugh.”

Those of us who do write often wonder why someone would spend this much time rewriting another author’s novel.

“I kind of do want to read the next fake book and see how its all resolved,” Chappell said. And the episode has turned others onto the fake books, too.

This is true. No good sex scenes in Harry Potter. Like the rest of American Culture, it is fine to kill people in a book written for kids. Violence is fine. Sex, not so much. And yes, I know that HP is not American, exactly, but it was written for an American audience. And if any culture is more jacked up about sexual taboos, it is Britain.

There is one thing about this whole scenario that seems really complicated. By book 5 in the series, Rowling has penned hundreds of pages of Potter. It would be hard to mistake another author’s work for hers. It clearly took Chappell a while to catch on. And now I have to read the Psychic Servant to see if that’s even remotely plausible.